It was just as obvious in 2012, if not more. It's just that they worked hard on pulling off a small but surprising crowdfunding/preorder-like campaign among a specific group right after they were pissed at Twitter for restricting client apps (betrayal) and basically pulling the plug on the protocol idea in favor of an ad business.

Their approach, however, by building a paid Twitter clone as the "killer app" of their platform, which isn't a very useful use case when you have free Twitter, awfully reminds me of what Dennis Ritchie wrote in Anti-Foreword of Unix Haters Handbook[1]:

"Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it"

They really wished they owned Twitter, and they did it their way, although if they really were Twitter owners, they too would have likely opted for the proven, lucrative, and more straightforward ad business over the protocol business at that point.

Criticism aside, it was probably worth trying anyway, and the fact that they raised funds in their initial campaign ($5/user if I remember correctly) was not easy to pull off and surprising.

[1]: https://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

Yes it was. The options were to pay money for a lower populated platform (App.net), vs a higher-populated platform for free. The only benefit was that App.net claimed it was going to be nicer with your data. Everything else was worse. App.net couldn't compete against Twitter with only one pro and several cons. It's only hope was to survive long enough until Twitter's investors got tired of sinking money into it and pulled the plug. Unfortunately for App.net Twitter managed to turn a profit.

It was obvious ever since the internet started.